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2457 posts latest post 2026-04-19
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Apr 2026 | 40 posts
From Markdown to Blog with Markata | lightning talk | python web conf 2022

Markata is a great python framework that allows you to go from markdown to a full website very quickly. You can get up and running with nothing more than Markdown. It is also built on a full plugin architecture, so if there is extra functionality that you want to add, you can create a plugin to make it behave like you want.

Full transparancy… I built markata.

The talk is live on YouTube. Make sure you check out the other videos from the conference. There were quite a few quality talks that deserve a watch as well.

https://youtu.be/Wq9YBamSgs0

Packages I Maintain

I open sourced the static site framework that I use to build my-blog among other side projects. It’s a plugins all the way down static site generator, that makes me happy to use.

{% gh_repo_list_topic “waylonwalker”, “markata” %}

my-blog is built on a number of small repos. I set it up this way so that creating content is fast and easy to do. I don’t have to worry about carrying around large images with my lightweight text files just to make some posts.

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I spoke at Python Web Conf 2022

I spoke at python webconf in March 2022 about how I deploy this blog on a continuous basis.

Building this blog has brought me a lot of benefits. I have a set of custom curated notes to help describe a problem and how to solve it to me. At theis point it’s not uncommon to google an Issue I am having and finding my own blog with exactly the solution I need at the top.

I also bump into people from time to time that recognize me from the blog, its a nice conversation starter, and street cred.

The talk recently released on Youtube, you can watch it without having a ticket to the conference for free. There were a bunch of other talks that you should check out too!

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I turned on 2FA for all of my pypi packages

I got all the pypi packages that I own behind 2 factor authentication. 💪

Recently this really made it’s rounds in the python news since pypi was requiring critical package maintainers to have 2FA on and even offering them hardware tokens to help them turn this on.

I feel like this caused a bit of confusion as turning on 2FA does not mean that you need to do anything different to deploy a package, and it DOES NOT require a hardware token. You can continue using your favorite 2FA app.

You might wonder what this means for my projects. It means that to edit any sensitive content such as pull a new api token, add/remove maintainers, or deleting a release I need to use a TOPT (time based one time password) application such as Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, Authy, or FreeOTP.

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I was on Talk Python

After years of listening to talkpython.fm I had the honor to be part of episode-337 to talk about Kedro for maintainable data science.

I was quite nervous to talk on a show that I helped shape my career in such a profound way. I started my journey towards software engineering near Michaels first few episodes. His discussions with such great developers over the years has made an huge impact on my skill. It has always given me great advice and topics to go deeper on.

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1 min read
python
use vim to remove duplicates

I just love how some features of vim are so discoverable and memorable once you really start to grasp it. Sorting and uniqing your files or ranges is one of those examples for me.

" sort the file :sort " sort the file only keeping unique lines :sort u " sort a range :'<,'> sort " sort a range only keeping unique lines :'<,'> sort u

I recently used this to dedupe my autogenerated links section for rich-syntax-range-style. More often I am using it to sort and uniqify objects like arrays and lists.

Here is what the markdown looks like.

* [py-tree-sitter](https://github.com/tree-sitter/py-tree-sitter) * [rich](https://github.com/Textualize/rich) * [@textualizeio](https://twitter.com/textualizeio) * [rich](https://github.com/Textualize/rich) * [another post](https://waylonwalker.com/designing-kedro-router) *...

vimgrep open buffers

How to vimgrep over hidden files.

I needed to delete all build pipeline steps that were named upload docs. I currently have about 60 projects running from the same template all running very similar builds. In the past I’ve scripted out migrations for large changes like this, they involved writing a python script that would load the yaml file into a dictionary, find the corresponding steps make the change and write it back out.

Today’s job was much simplar, just delete the step, were all steps are surrounded by newlines. My first thought was to just open all files in vim and run dap. I just needed to get these files:positions into my quickfix. My issue is that all the builds reside within hidden directories by convention.

variability

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vim
markata 0.3.0 is 15-20% faster

image from Dall-e

a sprinter edging out his opponent by Dall-e

It’s about time to release Markata 0.3.0. I’ve had 8 pre-releases since the last release, but more importantly it has about 3 months of updates. Many of which are just cleaning up bad practices that were showing up as hot spots on my pyinstrument reports

Markata started off partly as a python developer frustrated with using nodejs for everything, and a desire to learn how to make frameworks in pluggy. Little did I know how flexible pluggy would make it. It started out just as my blog...

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name it claim it aim it

People exceptionally talented in the Deliberative theme are best described by the serious care they take in making decisions or choices. They anticipate obstacles.

I am risk-adverse. I want everything well thought out and calculated before I make any sort of change. I have never gambled in my life and just the thought of it makes me anxious.

I can use this as a strength to plan out potential issues and prevent them. I do this quite often with my role in infrastructure.

I need to make sure that I use deadlines to keep this as a strength and not hinderence.

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get the version of any python package | python api

A common meta thing that I need in python is to find the version of a package. Most of the time I reach for package_name.__version__, but that does not always work.

In searching the internet for an answer nearly every one of them pointed me to __version__. This works for most projects, but is simply a convention, its not required. Not all projects implement a __version__, but most do. I’ve never seen it lie to me, but there is nothing stopping someone from shipping mismatched versions.

I appreciate it

While its not required its super handy and easy for anyone to remember off the top of their head. It makes it easy to start debugging differences between what you have vs what you see somewhere else. You can do this by dropping a __version__ variable inside your __init__.py file.

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The one reason I switched to arch

The community, that’s it, end of post, roll the credits.

I am a tinkerer, I am not going to run a stock desktop manager, mostly becuase that’s just not how my brain works. I need to tweak everything to fit my needs. Grantid I have not spent much time in many full fledged linux desktop environments. They are far more customizable than windows ever will be, I absolutely love that about them. Inevitibly I end up in a situation where I hit a wall, it just won’t do what I want it to do, or my lack of understanding what came wtih it holds me back.

I love minimal installs. I love just building up my system from the bottom up with things that I like, I understand, and that I can script.

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